Thompson said he could have opened up a storefront on a busy commercial strip but prefers the market, even with the smaller crowds. "You got a store and you wait for the people," he said, a cowboy hat perched on his head. "Here you don't have to wait; the people are coming."
Thompson, 67, said he spends not a moment fretting over the market's future. "Why worry?" he asked. "You have no control over what you have you no control over."
Wholesalers and distribution trucks crowd Fourth Street NE. The Capital City Market, which stretches from Second to Sixth Street NE, replaced a wholesaling district that was razed in 1931 to make way for the National Archives building.
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From the 1870s through the 1920s, Washington's primary place to buy food downtown was Center Market, between Seventh and Ninth streets along Pennsylvania Avenue, where more than 650 vendors sold meats and cheeses and chickens and fish.
The market was razed in 1931 to make way for the National Archives, and federal and District officials opened a new market center off Florida Avenue NE, on the grounds of what was once a Union army camp. "It was really the first wholesale terminal market in Washington," said Helen Tangiers, a historian who has written about public markets in the United States. "It was considered a feeder market for groceries and supermarkets."
In the early years, it was known as the Union Terminal Market, and the proprietors included Leo Dekelbaum and Sam Mirman and Fred Kolker, who owned a poultry house.
Then, as now, it was a world that roared to life when the rest of Washington was asleep. Work shifts began at 1 a.m. and continued all night as trucks and tractor trailers pulled up to load orders. In the afternoon, the owners gathered for eggs and bagels at Hendrix and lunch at Cannon's or the Market Deli, where they talked business over steaks and corned beef sandwiches and kosher hot dogs.
Jack Dekelbaum, 67, whose father founded the meat company, has spent virtually his entire life at the market. He remembers when eggs were delivered in big wooden crates and the freezers were filled with sides of beef hanging from hooks. He remembers the butchers, with nicknames like "The Shicker" -- Yiddish for drunk -- a man who sipped Canadian whiskey in between his time at the butcher block, slicing meat.
"You started out doing deliveries, and when you got older, you did office work," Dekelbaum said. "There was real community."
Over the years, some of the older businesses relocated to the suburbs, while others closed because the owners' children preferred livelihoods that did not require them to start work in the middle of the night.
Sonny Dekelbaum, 42, the grandson of the company's founder, was the only member of the family's younger generation interested in taking over the business. He started working at the shop part time when he was 11, then full time when he was 17. After all these years, he said, he's accustomed to getting to work long before sunrise.
At one time, the Dekelbaums catered to restaurants and neighborhood groceries, selling them mostly steaks and hamburgers. Now many restaurants buy from large food distribution companies, and the groceries have been replaced by Korean delis, which do not stock fresh meat.
So Sonny Dekelbaum has found new customers. In recent years, he started selling goat meat to the African restaurants that were opening up, and pigs' feet to Chinese restaurants. He sells ground pork to Vietnamese restaurants, which use it for their spring rolls.
"I like the hustle," Dekelbaum said on a recent morning. "I can sell anything to anyone. While you're sleeping, I'm thinking of ways of making a dollar."
Years ago, he said, he knew most of the market's proprietors by name. Today, many are strangers to him. But the new owners in many ways are similar to his grandfather, immigrants seeking to build businesses and a financial foundation for their families.
A block away, at Obeng's International Wholesalers, John Obeng sees African restaurateurs from as near as Northeast and retailers from as far as South Carolina coming to shop for fresh okra and croaker.
Kossi Ametoswossi, 49, a high school teacher, came from Langley Park to stock up on tilapia and smoked turkey, items he said he cannot find at his local supermarket.
"This is where I have to go to get my food," he said. "There's nothing else like it."
